Introduction

Mobile wireless data is the transmission of digital information, through a wireless network, to radios that typically move throughout a geographic area. The success of mobile wireless data systems had been limited, until the mid 1990 s, due to the high cost of service and equipment, and limited geographic coverage areas. In the mid 1990 s, service usage and equipment costs dropped due to competition and availability of applications and end user devices. Many wireless data systems are now available globally.

In addition to the mobile wireless data systems covered in this chapter, there are also many types of fixed wireless data systems. These systems include wireless local loop (WLL), wireless local area network (WLAN) and wireless cable. The fixed systems are covered in chapter 9.

The growth of the Internet has also enabled low cost, standardized access to wireless data networks which is accelerating the growth of the wireless data marketplace. In 1998, some wireless data systems had more then 700,000 active devices operating in their system. It is predicted that there will be over 10 million wireless data devices in use by the year 2001.

Figure 6.1 shows a basic wireless data system. In this example, many types of wireless data devices communicate through a public wireless data system. In the core of the system, there is a switching system. The switching system commonly routes the data between the wireless device and a computer system (such as a company computer). In this diagram, there are more receivers than transmitters.